of British legislation connected with fiscal matters has been undertaken, not so much with a view to increase the revenue as with the object of distributing the burthen of taxation equally amongst the different classes of society.  Much of this legislation has been perfectly justifiable and even beneficial.  Nevertheless, it should never be forgotten that it is generally based on the purely Western principle that abstract justice is in itself a desirable thing to attain, and that a fiscal or administrative system stands condemned if it is wanting in symmetry.  It was against any extreme application of this principle that Burke directed some of his most forcible diatribes.[18] It has been already pointed out that the commendable want of intellectual symmetry which is the inherited possession of the Englishman gives him a very great advantage as an Imperialist agent over those trained in the rigid and bureaucratic school of Continental Europe.  But the Englishman is a Western, albeit an Anglo-Saxon Western, and, from the point of view of all processes of reasoning, the gulf which separates any one member of the European family from another is infinitely less wide than that which divides all Westerns from all Orientals.  Even the Englishman, therefore, is constrained—­sometimes much against his will—­to bow down in that temple of Logic, the existence of which the Oriental is disposed altogether to ignore.  Indeed, sometimes the choice lies between the enforcement on the reluctant Oriental of principles based on logic—­occasionally on the very simple science of arithmetic—­or abandoning the work of civilisation altogether.  From this point of view, the dangers to which the British Empire is exposed by reason of fiscal measures are due not, as was the case with Rome, to barbarous, but rather to ultra-scientific finance.  The following is a case in point.

The land-tax has always been the principal source from which Oriental potentates have derived their revenues.  For all practical purposes it may be said that the system which they have adopted has generally been to take as much from the cultivators as they could get.  Reformers, such as the Emperor Akbar, have at times endeavoured to introduce more enlightened methods of taxation, and to carry into practice the theories upon which the fiscal system in all Moslem countries is based.  Those theories are by no means so objectionable as is often supposed.  But the reforms which some few capable rulers attempted to introduce have almost always crumbled away under the regime of their successors.[19] In practice, the only limit to the demands of the ruler of an Oriental State has been the ability of the taxpayers to satisfy them.[20] The only defence of the taxpayers has lain in the concealment of their incomes at the risk of being tortured till they divulged their amount.

Nevertheless, even under such a system as this, the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb by the fact that Oriental rulers recognise that they cannot get money from a man who possesses none.  If, from drought or other causes, the cultivator raises no crop, he is not required to pay any land-tax.  The idea of expropriation for the non-payment of taxes is purely Western and modern.  Under Roman law, it was the rule in contracts for rent that a tenant was not bound to pay if any vis major prevented him from reaping.